#RivetingReviews: West Camel reviews FLOOD TIDE by Ana Schnabl, translated by Rawley Grau

Flood Tide has all the trappings of a conventional crime novel: writer Dunja returns to her hometown – a rather tired seaside resort on the Adriatic – to investigate the unexplained death of her brother, Dražen, decades before. While there she meets up with her and Dražen’s old friends, and as the tone becomes ever more noir, she slowly uncovers the toxic relationships and deep-seated prejudices that led to his demise. In true crime-fiction style, she’s also forced to confront some difficult truths about her own past and to reassess her current life in light of the discoveries she makes.

Ana Schnabl is not the slightest bit coy about all this: Dunja regularly refers to herself as the “Great Detective” or the “G.D.” and often reflects on proceedings as if they were events in a crime novel, going so far as to wonder: “How had Agatha Christie handled the issue, or more to the point, how had Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot handled it?”

But Ana Schnabl is not writing a conventional crime novel; instead it seems she is writing what she’d like a crime novel to be. During Dunja’s investigation – which mostly consists of interviewing people of interest – she spends as much, if not more time exploring the philosophical ideas and intellectual puzzles that spring to her mind as she does the content of her subject’s answers. On first meeting Dražen’s close friend, and possibly girlfriend, Mirela, amid a long description of her appearance, we’re told:

For a moment it occurred to Dunja that, maybe, when she observed a woman she didn’t know, she wasn’t looking at a cacophony but rather at an unfurled recording of free jazz, which always seems totally random but which also reveals again and again that there is no randomness without a theme, without, one might say, a question that propels it.

In fact, Dunja can indulge in these kinds of meditations at any point – while eating ice cream on the seafront or standing on a packed bus – and is often frustrated when her train of thought is interrupted. It is in these ruminations that we see the great skill of the translator, Rawley Grau, who offers clarity, rhythm and beauty in passages that must have been a significant challenge to render in English.

Crime novels rarely devote so much space to such complexity; they are commonly much neater, much more compact – the investigator’s thought processes concentrated on the matter at hand. But Dunja’s propensity to follow her musings wherever they take her offers a more natural, more authentic experience – a mind attempting to pick apart the mystery of a loved one’s death, while at the same time occupied and distracted by the stream of consciousness that passes through all our minds as we go about our lives.

In Dunja, this stream is strong, and when combined with the seismic discoveries she eventually makes, it becomes the flood tide of the title. Her always busy mind turns frantic, and the overwhelm is conveyed in the text through parentheses, exclamation marks, spaced letters, dropped punctuation, thickets of italics and capital letters, and line breaks. These are not always successful, in some places spoiling the intended effect through overuse. But the disturbingly noirish denouement should satisfy both the seasoned crime reader and the literary fiction fan.

Reviewed by West Camel

FLOOD TIDE

Written by Ana Schnabl

Translated from the Slovenian by Rawley Grau

Published by Divided Publishing (2025)

March 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

West Camel is a writer, reviewer and editor. He edited Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2015 and has written two novels, Attend and Fall. He is the editor of The Riveter magazine and helps edit the #RivetingReviews for the European Literature Network. He is currently taking a sabbatical from his role as editorial director at Orenda Books to write his third novel.

Read West Camel’s #RivetingReview of THE SUN SCRIPT by Rein Raud, translated by Christopher Moseley

Read West Camel’s #RivetingReview of THE OLD FIRE by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Read West Camel’s #RivetingReview of THE CITY AND THE HOUSE by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Dick Davis

Read West Camel’s #RivetingReview of HUNGRY FOR WHAT by María Bastarós

Read West Camel’s #RivetingReview of JOURNEYS AND FLOWERS by Mercè Rodoreda

Read West Camel’s #RivetingReview of FAMILY and BORGHESIA by Natalia Ginzburg

Read West Camel’s #RivetingReview of THE TIME OF CHERRIES by Montserrat Roig

Read West Camel’s #RivetingReview of VLADIVOSTOCK CIRCUS by Elisa Shua Dusapin

Read West Camel’s #RivetingReview of VALENTINO and SAGGITARIUS by Natalia Ginzburg

Read West Camel’s #RivetingReview of Mercè Rodoreda

Read West Camel’s #RivetingReview of ALL OUR YESTERDAYS by Natalia Ginzburg

Read West Camel’s #RivetingReview of WINTER IN SOKCHO and THE PACHINKO PARLOUR by Elisa Shua Dusapin